The Fire and the Ghosts of Walden Woods

There are two facts about Walden Woods that the gentle, contemplative reputation of Henry David Thoreau's book tends to obscure. The first is that Thoreau once set the woods on fire. The second is that the woods he walked were not empty. They were a populated ruin, the former home of Concord's freed slaves, and John Kaag reads Thoreau's decision to write about both as among the more radical things in the book.

The Fire Thoreau Set

Start with the fire, because it complicates Saint Henry. In April of 1844, a year before he moved to the pond, Thoreau's campfire got away from him. Kaag tells it without softening. "The fire burned 300 acres of forest and set basically all of the woods around Concord ablaze and was very, very lucky not to burn the town down as well." The local newspaper put the damage at two thousand dollars and called Thoreau thoughtless. Kaag does not let him off. "Thoughtless, in other words, not very deliberate, which was 100 percent true." The man who would build a career on the word deliberate had, in the most literal way, been the opposite of it, and nearly burned down the town he loved. Kaag quotes Thoreau's own later journal account of setting out that day with fishing tackle and a borrowed match, a scene that reads like the prelude to a disaster the writer never fully lived down.

The fire matters partly because it changes how we read the famous chapters on warmth and flame. When Thoreau stares into his fire in the House-Warming chapter, Kaag notes, he is a man with a history. "You can always see a face in the fire," Thoreau writes, and Kaag hears the weight of 1844 in it. He reads House-Warming as "one of the more emotionally warm chapters of the book," a meditation on the effort to cultivate a little light and heat before the dark, by a man who knew exactly how dangerous and how fragile fire could be. The warmth is recognized, Kaag says, only against the impending freeze.

Brister Freeman and the Former Inhabitants

But the deeper revelation of the winter chapters is who Thoreau finds in the frozen woods. In Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors, Thoreau walks the cellar holes of people who had lived in Walden Woods before him, and he names the freed slaves of Concord among them. Kaag is emphatic about how unusual this was. "Thoreau does something that many of his even most liberal abolitionist friends would have regarded as extremely radical," he says, "which was that he associated and visited with the formerly enslaved peoples of Walden Woods and gave them a type of description that they rarely received from white Victorian authors." And the description, Kaag stresses, avoids the trap of sentimentality. "There isn't a great deal of romanticism in Thoreau's description. It's not overblown. It's very down to earth and very humanizing in a very interesting way."

One name carries the chapter, and Kaag dwells on it: Brister Freeman. Thoreau records him as a former slave of Squire Cummings, buried in the Lincoln burying-ground near the unmarked graves of British grenadiers. Kaag fills in the history Thoreau gestures at. "Brister Freeman lived during the American Revolution and in fact did three tours of duty" fighting for American independence. And the name itself tells a story. He had once been called Brister Cummings, carrying his enslaver's name. "When he signed up to fight in the American Revolution, he resigned his name Cummings and took on this last name Freeman." Kaag calls it "an incredibly bold move," and notes that Thoreau "seems to be pointedly aware of how revolutionary this decision would have been," given that many Black soldiers kept their enslavers' names. A man fighting for a nation's freedom claimed his own in the act of naming himself.

Kaag reads Thoreau's attention to these former inhabitants as a deliberate counter-history. The woods that look like pure nature are, in Thoreau's telling, a human ruin, threaded with the cellar holes and apple trees of people the official record forgot. Thoreau quotes the epitaph of Brister Freeman and notes its cruelty, the way it tells you when the man died as "an indirect way of informing me that he ever lived." Kaag hears Thoreau insisting on the opposite, that these people lived, that their traces remain in the land, that the woods are populated by their absence. He connects it to Thoreau's broader interest in the marginalized, the people whom a society defines as normal by pushing to its outskirts and keeping unseen. Thoreau, Kaag says, "wants to interrogate forcefully" that relationship between a civilization and its outcasts.

Who Crosses the Snow for You

The winter chapters end on a quieter human note that Kaag clearly loves. Thoreau says he likes the winter because it shows you who your friends are, in an age before, as Kaag puts it, "Gore-Tex and heavy goose-down jackets." To walk the mile to the pond over ice and snow was to prove a friendship. Kaag turns it into a challenge Thoreau effectively poses to the reader, and that Kaag poses to himself: "I think I'm a poet enough to cross the snow for my true friends. Are you?"

So the woods of Walden, far from the empty Eden of the postcard, are scarred by a fire their famous chronicler set, and haunted by the freed slaves whose lives he insisted on recording when almost no one else would. Kaag's reading restores both facts to the book. Thoreau was a man capable of carelessness that nearly cost his town its forest, and capable of a moral attention, toward Brister Freeman and the others, that ran ahead of even his abolitionist friends. The woods hold both. So does the book.